Nagios forked by Icinga for open source monitoring

By Sean Kerner | May 06, 2009

From the 'forking open source' files:

Nagios is critical open source application providing monitoring capabilities that are widely used (by millions?) by many including myself. Yet apparently the pace of Nagios evolution wasn't fast enough or inclusive enough for all, so a group of contributors is now forking Nagios and making their own Nagios-based open source systems monitoring solution called 'icinga.'

According to icinga's website, their goal is to,"be more responsive to user
requests and faster in software development through the support of a
broader developer community."

Initially (at least), icinga is set to be compatible with Nagios, which is how forks typically start out. Over time though it is rare in my experience that forks remain compatable.

Take Nessus for example (no longer open source but it was), it's open source fork OpenVAS is no longer compatible with the leading edge of Nessus development. That's a bit of a different case though as Tenable (the commerical sponsor of Nessus) claimed back in 2005 that the open source development model wasn't working for Nessus.

With Nagios, the claim is a little different. The claim is that there are governance and development issues that current organization structure of the Nagios project are not addressing, so the Icinga people are the option of forking and starting their own project.

Icinga claims that its members have attempted to clear the development bottleneck but have been unsuccessful.

"Long awaited improvements
such as the regular integration of community patches, the connection to
databases or the web interface were hoped to be accelerated," Icinga claims. "Unfortunately, these attempts came to little success and effective
community commitment has gradually deflated."